“Through a Glass, Darkly” – the Resto Druid Way, Pt 3

So here we are! Through the gauntlet, and ready to take on a huge dragon.

Couple things before starting. First, running up the ramp to where the void boss usually lives will start the event. Don’t go up until you’re ready.

Second, if you die and run back, there’s a nice glowy portal that brings you here.

Don’t try to run in manually, you can’t get across the chasm. After some period of time, the portal goes away and the gauntlet respawns. My guess is it’s something like an hour after you first clear the gauntlet – so yes, you might have to clear it again. It took me several days to beat the boss so I think I ran the gauntlet four times.

Now, take a minute to look at the fighting area. You’ve got the ramp and platform, and you can also run around in the area in front of the ramp a bit. Don’t get too far away or he’ll despawn and that sucks.

When you’re ready, go up the ramp. Tarecgosa goes with you, and then Thyrinar appears. He stuns Tarecgosa and now you get to fight him. he starts at 50% health, but that 50% is going to take a while.

Be in boomkin form when you go up the ramp. As soon as he goes active, pop Barkskin, dot him up, and blast away with cast spells. Be ready. When he flies over to the other side of the platform, get to the ramp. When he breathes fire, run down the ramp and don’t let the fire hit you. Hot yourself up at this time, and lay Wild Mushrooms near the bottom/middle of the ramp.

Pro tip: run down one side of the ramp. That way the fire only hits one side and you can go up. Also don’t cut to the other side as you leave the bottom of the ramp. The fire will follow you and block the bottom. Cut toward the same side the fire is on until the beam is off the ramp and then run in a circle around it to get to the other side.

After the fire is done, he starts shadow bolting you again, but more importantly an add spawns at the bottom of the ramp. These adds suck. But there’s a way to handle them. They spawn at the bottom of the ramp, run up the ramp, look around, and come hunting you. If you’re at the bottom, you can dot them up, blow your wild mushrooms, and they will either be dead or nearly there when they come back.

When you can’t kill them this way, they have a couple nasty abilities. A Silence, a Fire Nova, and a nasty melee hit that can daze you. Don’t forget about Entangling Roots or Nature’s Grasp as a way to get them off your back.

The adds spawn… fast. Somewhere I read every 30 seconds but I think it’s more for druids because we don’t have to worry about the self-heal thing that all the other classes have to deal with, thanks to us not having an offensive dispell.

Anyway. Add is dead. Run up the ramp – check your health! – and dot up the boss. Barkskin might be back up. Use it on cooldown. Watch for Starsurge procs, and use them when you can. Don’t hard cast Starsurge or use Starfire, they’re just too slow. You’re more likely going to be healing yourself.

The first two add spawns sync nicely with fire, but the third one seems to spawn a good ten seconds before the fire. Beware of that. After that I didn’t notice a pattern.

You might get your treants to help you with adds, or they might just sort of wander around shaking their fists at the boss.

The key to this fight is movement, and keeping your dots and hots going. And your mana up. Innervate early and often. Don’t let the fire hit you. Get the adds dead. Rinse, repeat.

My successful fight took 15 minutes and some of my attempts took nearly as long. This is a long, long fight. Be prepared. You will probably wipe a few times learning to handle it.

I actually had Reversion helping me toward the end by sitting over my shoulder and watching my procs and cooldowns – “Barkskin’s back, use it!” “Starsurge, starsurge!” “Add spawning, get the mushrooms down!” It helped me. If you have a friend or partner who plays WoW and can sit there with you, and you won’t kill him for this sort of thing, it can be really valuable to have another set of eyes.

(Rev editorial: It is a nasty little fight. Doing it in a spec you are not already pro with is hard. You have a lot of procs and abilities to use and the difference between Barkskin at a critical time or 15 seconds later because you did not notice it was off cooldown… well that is life or death on this fight. If you find you aren’t using some things you might just macro, grasphing roots, barkskin, starfall, and inervate to something you spam so you can’t possibly miss using them. Also be sure to space those mushrooms out as you run up or down the ramp. If you have spare mouse buttoms you might map the shrooms to a click. It makes them a lot easier to use while moving. Use those ramp runs to be dropping shrooms or healing, or both. If you are not used to shrooming remember this: it takes time to drop them and then blow them. Don’t aim them where the add is. Aim them where he is going to be in a little while. If you just space out all three around the center of the ramp it is almost always the right place.)

Doing this chain improved my boomkin skills a huge amount. I’m still a Resto druid, but now I can do some decent DPS, too.

If you’ve got any questions about any part of this chain, please feel free to ask me!

OH – don’t forget to click the clickable thing near Tarecgosa after Thyrinar is defeated, or you won’t get the quest completion, which would kind of suck.